Now, thanks to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and the Mass Library System, we have access to one more--a database specific to the support of nursing students and professionals--called Nursing Resource Center.

Either click on or search specific drugs or diseases in the right search boxes (indicated the screenshot above) or do a simple keyword search in the Basic Search box in the yellow area to the left.

The default results will usually link you to "Diseases and Conditions" entries from a Gale medical encyclopedia or two. These would be useful to get a grounding in the topic and to learn some of the vocabulary used in discussions of that subject. But if you are supposed to use journal literature, click the separate tab for Journals. (See arrow in above screenshot.)

Reference book materials include a 2008 PDR Nurses Drug Handbook, Delmar texts like Foundations of Basic Nursing, and the Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health. There are drug monographs, medical illustrations, and even more than 200 nursing-related animations in the database, as well. For more on what's in the database and how to search effectively, take a look at this publisher webpage.

To be frank, this is NOT the best database we have for medical research. If you need scholarly journal literature related to medicine or psychiatry, I would recommend MEDLINE with Full Text as your best option. This exhaustive database indexes just about all medical journal literature and links you to all the publisher content that we have (just look for the 360 link green dot below results entries). And if you want more readable content for personal information, the user-friendly Health and Wellness Resource Center might be your best bet.

But if you do have an interest in nursing information specifically, then this database provided by the Commonwealth is worth exploring.

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